A indústria petroquímica na formulação de políticas ambientais internacionais: o caso do Tratado Global de Plásticos (2022-2025)

Abstract

In the first decades of the 21st century, the amount of plastic waste in the ocean has grown significantly, amplifying its socioeconomic and environmental impacts. Ocean plastic has become a transnational problem, demanding coordinated responses within the framework of global environmental governance. Through Resolution 5/14 of the United Nations Environment Assembly, the Intergovernmental Committee was convened to establish a Global Plastics Treaty, aiming to combat plastic pollution throughout its entire life cycle. In this context, this research seeks to understand how the petrochemical industry engages with the treaty negotiations, highlighting the strategies of private actors in global environmental policy. To this end, a mixed-methods approach is adopted, based on a case study and automated content analysis of official documents. The results indicate that the petrochemical sector actively participates in the discussions through the preparation of position papers and the practice of blocking, acting to secure its economic and regulatory interests through instruments that legitimize its discursive, structural, and instrumental power. These results suggest that the inclusion of this actor in the negotiations is occurring in the direction predicted by the literature on corporate participation in global environmental governance, and that overcoming the impasses in the negotiations, so that the treaty promotes changes in the status quo, does not require a drastic change in the participation of this sector in this negotiating arena.